Research master thesis | Classics and Ancient Civilizations (research) (MA)
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This thesis explores the way women in selected Euripidean tragedies engage with verbal communication and proposes that this female verbal repertoire can serve as a foundation for a feminist...Show moreThis thesis explores the way women in selected Euripidean tragedies engage with verbal communication and proposes that this female verbal repertoire can serve as a foundation for a feminist interpretation of the respective plays. Female interaction with verbal communication can be separated into three distinct categories: a) silence, b) song, and c) speech. Following this categorization, this thesis firstly delves into specific verses from Medea (259-268) and Hippolytus (710-723, 800-805) to indicate that female tragic silence entails a skillful manipulation of speech. Secondly, verses from Medea (410-430) and two fragments from Hypsipyle (752h 3-9, 759a 80-89) are examined to demonstrate how female tragic song can function as a lyrical form of feminine language. Thirdly, Pasiphae’s apologia (472e 4-12, 34-41) in the Cretans is analyzed to pinpoint how female tragic speech can be rhetorically constructed, serving as a springboard for self-exculpation and female empowerment. Drawing from French feminism and American post-structuralist feminism, this study orchestrates a dialogue between the Euripidean corpus and (post) modern feminist theory and indicates how a reader-oriented approach to the ancient texts can both honor a historically grounded reception of tragedy and suggest how modern audiences can imbue classical tragic texts with fresh meaning.Show less
This thesis explores the ways in which speech and silence are used by characters in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" in order to deal with the identity conflicts of the fourteenth century....Show moreThis thesis explores the ways in which speech and silence are used by characters in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" in order to deal with the identity conflicts of the fourteenth century. Characters use speech to either show others which external behaviour belongs to their reputation or to control and regulate others’ external behaviour, which shows they believe their external behaviour is more important than their internal selves. Characters use silence to gain power over others or to save themselves, which shows they prioritise the individual instead of the community and favour the internal self instead of external behaviour.Show less
The influential relationship between the two twentieth century philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida has profoundly challenged the way we perceive philosophy’s responsibility toward the...Show moreThe influential relationship between the two twentieth century philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida has profoundly challenged the way we perceive philosophy’s responsibility toward the other. While these philosophers in an ongoing exchange broach the question of the other’s response, there remains the question if the other can also respond to what they say. Challenging the attainability of “successful” dialogue, this thesis examines the limits of thinking the response of the other philosophically. It does this through an innovative reading of “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” a remarkable text by Derrida in which he examines what it means to write a response to the works of Levinas. It shows how such a response, in view of what Levinas writes, must necessarily fail. My reading of this text shows that we must nevertheless embrace the possibility of failure, even if it means putting Levinas’s entire work at risk, since the very finitude of my own response is also what allows the other to come in and respond. Seen this way, I propose that a reading specifically aimed at the “failures” at work in Derrida’s response to Levinas can be a viable strategy not only to arrive at a better understanding of this text, but also to come up with responses of our own.Show less
Non-native English accents, imprinted with the organic condition of a foreign tongue, sometimes can trigger harassment and violence from native speakers. Being a ‘scandalous’ linguistic performance...Show moreNon-native English accents, imprinted with the organic condition of a foreign tongue, sometimes can trigger harassment and violence from native speakers. Being a ‘scandalous’ linguistic performance of an alien body, non-native accents epitomize how the body demarcates the agency of speech, and at the same time how speech impinges on the bodily domain. To understand accent-related violence and the intertwined relation between body and speech, this paper examines accented speech within a hate speech paradigm, and seeks to add a further degree of nuance to this area by including a close reading of certain scenes depicted in literary texts. Accented English, often labeled as ‘broken’ or ‘fractured,’ determines to a large extent the social relevance of the speaking body. Moreover, accented speech functions not always as a voluntary ‘coming-out;’ in some cases, the accented speaker is not socially sanctioned to remain silent, but is forced to speak out his/her foreignness. However, accented speech does not necessarily point to passivity; it questions the native speaker’s ingrained perception of his/her ‘natural’ bond with the mother tongue, all the while giving rise to a different kind of survivability for the accented speaker.Show less
